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Food

Flavor-Changing Milk Is an Astoundingly Needless Invention

A former chemistry professor has come up with a milk drink that looks like a lava lamp and switches from tasting like plain to chocolate to strawberry. But do we want it?
Hilary Pollack
Los Angeles, US
Photo via Flickr user Connie Ma

Of all of the troubles and cares that one can be faced with while going through the motions of daily life, has your personal dilemma ever been that you are drinking a tall, cold glass of chocolate milk and wishing that it would intermittently switch to tasting like strawberries? That you were sipping on a carafe of Quik and suddenly found yourself entirely bored with the flavor sensation, but only in fleeting, sip-by-sip intervals? And despite desperate campaigns from the dairy industry to prove milk's necessity (and ever-emerging research that suggests that more milk isn't better), are you still concerned that your child is not chugging enough udder juice on the daily?

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Well, a "dairy entrepreneur" named Larry Martin is here to shake things up for you—with "Shaka," his flavor-globule-laden beverage invention. If you love globules, you're going to love Shaka!

This is the gist: Shaka (pronounced "shay-kuh") consists of two packets of space goop—one Pepto Bismol-colored, one murky brown—which you squeeze, toothpaste-style, into a jar or bottle. The pink one is the strawberry milk, while the cocoa-colored one is chocolate, but they do not dissolve or swirl into your vessel of whole, or 2 percent, or fat-free. Instead, they settle at the bottom of the jar like a broken lava lamp, piling disconcertingly in strange configurations resembling a rejected Rothko.

But here's the big idea—when you shake the jar, the "flavor bands" or what-have-you break up into distressing blobs of assorted sizes. Look, there's a big strawberry globule that looks like Zaire! And there's a chocolate one that looks like the mole on top of your foot! And because they aren't uniformly distributed throughout the drink—the elegance of say, Orbitz is certainly lacking—each sip of the milk will taste slightly different. Enjoy a mouthful of regular ol' white stuff followed by a blast of cocoa and then a raw avalanche of strawberry—then an amorphous sip tasting vaguely of both!

shaka-milk-3-flickr

Sioux City, Iowa-based inventor Larry Martin is a former professor of organic chemistry at Morningside College and former professor at University of Syracuse and University of Tampa, and spent "years" in his basement working on a formula that would best allow for this flavor-changing trick. Shaka's "secret"—though it ain't much of one—is gelatin, which keeps the stuff sticking to itself. The more you shake, the smaller the globules will become, and the more mixed the flavors will be. (There's arguably something a little Frankensteinian about adding gelatin to milk, considering that it's made predominantly from cow bones, skin, and hooves.)

Apparently, Gelita—a leading manufacturer of gelatin products—is taking a strong interest in it, potentially seeking to apply its principles to other beverages. Martin selected milk specifically because of his belief in its health benefits for children. Unsurprisingly, the company has also been in talks with the massive dairy interest group Dairy Management Inc.

Shaka is just one attempt of many to rebrand the idea of drinking milk for milk's sake in recent years. Dairy milk has been on the decline as a beverage over the past couple of decades, with rising competition from plant-based alternatives and more questioning of its nutritional benefits (though we're eating more cheese than ever). Regardless, many companies continue to tout milk as a health product, such as Coca-Cola's new "ultra-filtered milk" Fairlife—which hasn't exactly been making the splash that marketers had hoped.

Martin's assistant, Dick Herschaer, tells the Norfolk Daily News, "If you want to taste big flavor bursts that … fill your mouth with chocolate, you just shake a little bit before you drink it … If you want more of a homogenized flavor, then you shake it more and the flavors are distributed more throughout the drink … It's the only drink in the world where the consumer can change the flavor without adding anything to the drink."

That may be true. But did we ask for it?